With several different businesses to choose from as you play through the game, players can gain insights into the differing impacts that an attack might have, and the various approaches that organisations might take to minimising the cost of an attack, and regaining access to their own data.

The Chat GPT component of the game gives players the opportunity to enter into negotiation with a ‘real’ (or real-time, at any rate), ransomeware organisation, while the cards are used to let players decide what actions they will take to resolve the situation, and how to spend their available cybersecurity budget.

James can come and facilitate this game in your organisation, as part of your security training provision. There are advantages to having an expert like James there to debrief the game, obviously, but mechnically, the game is simple enough to be run internally (subject to having a pro GPT account), once you know how to play. Get in touch with James via LinkedIn or check out his other services at the Bores Group Ltd website.

Also, don’t forget to book your place for the upcoming Play Secure Conference on the 21st and 22nd June, 2024. James has been running this for four years now, and it was this event which inspired the creation of this game. This year’s event is also dear to Ludogogy’s heart, as I’ll be speaking there on the use of ‘Keepsake’ Games for Wellness.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post James Bore – The Ransomeware Game first appeared on Ludogogy.

This deck has been carefully crafted to enable facilitators and business leaders to pick through specifi business objectives and evaluate any inherent risk.

Guided by the cards, you will facilitate an holistic conversation around all aspects of the objective, while drilling into the potential impacts of going ahead. The group will consider the implications of a range of universal risk categories as outlined on the ‘Risky Business’ cards to fully understand, measure and mitigate the risks.

The process will help the group to identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats contained within the objective and enable a confident transition to purposeful action.

Put simply, ‘Risky Business’ provides peace of mind when making those all important business decisions.

To coincide with each Show and Tell episode, Darren will be making the featured deck FREE for 30 days. So don’t forget to keep coming back to see what the featured deck of the month can do for you.

Free to use as often as you wish from the date this Show ‘n’ Tell drops, until early New Year (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Risky Business first appeared on Ludogogy.

The Great Christmas Deck has two types of cards. The first contains a series of light-hearted festive-themed questions to get your players talking and getting to know one another a little bit better. Find out who thinks that Christmas presents should all be homemade, or which members of your team love, or hate, marzipan. Perfect for getting the fun started at your office end-of-year get-together. And once the conversation is flowing abit you can throw in some ‘Warm and Fuzzy’ conversational interludes, inviting folk to share their favourite memories of this special time of year.

The second deck recreates the fun, and maybe frustrating, experience of solving a sliding tile puzzle. With a suitably Christmassy image as your target, you have to slide your cards around the Ipsodeckso table (no cheating by lifting and dropping, please) utilising the single space to manoeuvre all the card into their correct places to complete the picture. Don’t forget that you can duplicate the URL of your Ipsodeckso window as many times as you like – to get the same card selection and layout – so why not run this as a competitive team challenge.

To coincide with each Show and Tell episode, Darren will be making the featured deck FREE for 30 days (in this case, BOTH decks until the festivities are over, early in the New Year). So don’t forget to keep coming back to see what the featured deck of the month can do for you.

Free to use as often as you wish from the date this Show ‘n’ Tell drops, until early New Year (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Double Festive Gift for You first appeared on Ludogogy.

Memory Lane is a deck made up of ‘Experience’ and ‘Timeline’ cards. Experiences are a number of different everday occurences or activities which all players will be familiar with, such as ‘Listening to Music’ or ‘Finding a Job’. The Timeline cards encourage conversations about how those experiences have changed over the lifetime of the players/learners. For example, they ask about your earliest personal encounter with the experience, or how you think it might look in the future.

Memory Lane is a great tool for facilitators to explore people’s readiness to accept change, and to make a start on helping an organisation to create a tailored approach to any particular change initiative,with consideration of their people’s attitudes and needs.

To coincide with each Show and Tell episode, Darren will be making the featured deck FREE for 30 days. So don’t forget to keep coming back to see what the featured deck of the month can do for you.

Free to use as often as you wish for 30 days from the date this Show ‘n’ Tell drops (until 24th November) (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Memory Lane Deck first appeared on Ludogogy.

Splatman is a social card game blending the visual essence of the Iconic arcade game Pacman with a game mechanic very similar to Poker. Each player is a bug exterminator with a mission to splat as many mutant cockroaches and ticks as possible, while clearing out bug eggs. This game is highly competitive while helping to develop a forward thinking, strategic mindset.

It’s also a great workout for everyone’s memory and an interesting test of communication skills! “I’m going up to the left of the tick!” “The bottom tick?” “No, the other tick!”

To coincide with each Show and Tell episode, Darren will be making the featured deck FREE for 30 days. So don’t forget to keep coming back to see what the featured deck of the month can do for you.

Free to use as often as you wish for 30 days from the date this Show ‘n’ Tell drops (until 24th August) (access via the ipsodeckso.com free membership option).

Ipsodeckso is a platform which is going to be of considerable interest to facilitators and coaches. It contains a number of great decks already, but also includes the capability for you to upload and use your own cards, for use on the same platform.

Show & Tell videos will all accumulate at the Show & Tell Page as they are published. You can also check out one of Darren’s games, ‘The Walking Dead’ which featured in a Ludogogy live play session.

If you would like to appear in a Show & Tell episode, get in touch at info@ludogogy.co.uk

The post Ipsodeckso – Splatman Deck first appeared on Ludogogy.

Brian Cant’s Dialectic

For international readers, or those of a fresher vintage than the authors, Brian Cant (no relation of Immanuel) presented a children’s television programme, along with guests including Jeremy irons in his pre-Pentaverate youth.

P-L-A-Y, P-L-A-Y… it made for a good theme song, at least. But when playfulness is confused for childishness, things get tricky, not least in conversations with Human Resources. So we set out to apply Ekvall’s insights in a way which business could make use of. Surely, we thought, that couldn’t be too much to ask.

We Need a Landscape – Call a Constable!

John Constable, preferably – but more about art therapy anon. Our adaptation of Ekvall’s findings set out to identify the key dimensions of what we call Creative Climate, a quality so closely related to Ludogogy’s founder calls Landscape that we’re not going to argue about it. The nature of the landscape and the clemency of the climate do tend to define the success of a day in the Great Outdoors, so it seems fair to identify as kindred spirits. What we soon found was that Creative Climate could be not only measured, but improved – and when the experience of measurement and change is delivered playfully, it works even better. If you’re curious enough to digest the full logic, there’s even a book about it called Creative Climate Change, but we’re not contributing here just to sell more copies so let’s share a summary to get started with.

What Gets Measured Gets Done – but whodunit?

The assumed consensus these days seems to be that ‘gamification’ is good while ‘gaming the system’ is bad – but maybe it’s the same human trait reflected in subtly different ways. We found that some previous attempts to gauge team culture, such as surveys, had been of limited use due to a tendency to tell visiting consultants what the boss wanted to hear. So we anonymised our scoring process, which immediately removed the ‘who said that?’ distraction while also making room for a bit of constructive competition. Our self-scored tool produces a spider’s web diagram and, when compared to that of an ‘ideal’ or high-performing team, leads to the temptation to show ‘em what we’re made of. In practice, gamesmanship thus introduced itself into the Creative Climate Change model without having to be invited – and we anonymised the team self-scoring process to avoid that become too much of a distraction. But the spider’s web usually proved informative, and once those spinnerets got pumping, the fun could really begin.

The Eye Of The Spider

Organisational Development folk sometimes talk about the difference between deficits based and strengths-based models of improvement. In helping teams to make sense of their spider’s web outputs, we found neither extreme useful; one gets people’s backs up while the other leads to excessive back-slapping. What does seem to work well is looking at the dimensions as a recipe rather than a list of ingredients – for a team to be successful, it needs to get the mix right.

All the Right Notes, but not Necessarily in the Right Order…

How playfulness interacts with other dimensions is often very instructive. To take a hypothetical case (because it’s rarely quite this simple), a team which scored high on Playfulness but rock bottom on Idea Time and Idea Support could well be frittering much of its time at the office ping-pong table and very rarely producing anything of real value. Yes, play is desirable in and of itself – but to really get something from it which will benefit the bottom line, a structure of positive habits is required. Fortunately, those habits can all become games too.

Surfacing the Submarine

Good ideas are often lurking just below the surface, and ‘idea liberation’ can be promoted quickly through a combination of freedom, risk-talking and playfulness itself. We know of several techniques to promote that, one of the most well-received being – wait for it – a card deck! As devoted music fans we’ve always been drawn to Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’ method – if it’s good enough to unblock creativity for David Bowie why shouldn’t we play too? It works remarkably for teams trying to innovate in bureaucratic or highly formal organisational cultures, where the random element of the deck cuts-through staid group-think, as well as generating a little laughter along the way (which is also great for getting creative juices flowing). “Mechanise something idiosyncratic”, for instance, is guaranteed to raise a chortle or two – and might accidentally distil your USP for wider use.

All Time is Relative – Lunchtime, Doubly So

Idea Time is an important dimension in Ekvall’s concept, and therefore in ours too. Much has been made of structural solutions, from Fed-Ex Days for creative tinkering to Lockheed’s skunk works, but where there isn’t yet C-suite permission for such radical methods it’s still possible to get almost as far – by making a game of it. We backed-up Creative Climate Change with a ‘periodic table’ of change techniques, so there are plenty of games to choose from, but one of the most immersive is the full-on role-play experience of Synectics. It certainly involves ample idea Timer, of necessity, but creating a metaphor for a business problem then riffing on themes surfaced by random (or are they?) stimuli is also a lot of fun – and, often to the surprise of PMOverseers and Prince-wallahs, it usually solves thorny problems a whole lot better than any number of Gantt charts could.

Without Visible Means of Support

Idea Support is a term which we have found has to be used with some care; if it looks like there isn’t enough, it can seem a criticism of the team manager. But it really is not just the boss’s responsibility; supporting the introduction of new ideas is a task for the organisation as a whole, and culture may need to evolve for this to happen meaningfully.

By this point, it might not be entirely surprising to learn that games can be part of the answer. But we’ve saved the best for last. In a workplace culture which views fresh ideas with a scepticism bordering upon phobic, laughter is not just desirable –it’s essential. So when Idea Support runs low, amongst the many responses available is the near legendary game of Reversals. The opening phase of this game is a riot of creativity, inviting as it does suggestions as to how we can completely screw-up the reputation, profitability or actual future of the business. You might accidentally write a new episode of The Thick Of It as a result. The second phase takes all the identified destructive factors and turns them on their heads, generating development options so easy to support that only a complete loser would demur. If you haven’t tried it before, you’ll be amazed at how well it works.

Wanna play?

The post Play with a Purpose first appeared on Ludogogy.